Month: February 2002

SoThere has published one letter a day from ordinary people who have something to say to one another for three years running. What a great idea. What a great use of the web.

Warning: This post written while stinking up the joint. I just got back from the gym

Sorry I haven’t been around, loyal reader(s?) of Where There’s Smoke. Between moving plans and finishing up a long interview with Jennfier Egan, the week has left the station with me stranded on the platform. Odd, I’ve only been blogging here for about 6 months (maybe more? I haven’t kept track), but I can tell when I haven’t posted in a little while. It’s a bit akin to the sour, metallic taste you get in your mouth if you haven’t brushed in a while.

So hey. Plans on buying the house are proceeding apace. My real estate agent (an old friend and the only way to go if you’re voluntarily morgaging your life away) is out of town this weekend so we’ve gone ahead and scheduled the inspection for next week. I didn’t know this but if you’re buying property, you want an expert to look it over, make sure the walls will hold up the ceiling, that water will flow when you turn a faucet and that a termite metropolis hasn’t sprung up in the floor. After that, you apply for a loan, bicker with the bank over how much they’ll give you, let the seller know, pay a bunch of other assorted fees, hopefully close on the property before an earthquake reduces it to matchsticks and then between paying mortage, property taxes, and climbing that mythical thing to nowhere called The Equity Ladder.

Or so I’m told. There are some other steps in here but I don’t remember. I’ve been trusting Britton the agent and she’s kept me afloat thus far.

To others possibly in the same boat (at last count, my friend Dinah had just moved to town, my friends Mena and Ben Trott may be on their way, and my youngest brother Daniel has his eye on the East Bay), I offer an excellent essay by my colleague at The Grotto, Ethan Waters.

Tomorrow is the Alternative Press Expo, a huge convening of over two hundred independent presses, zinesters, independent comic artists, and other assorted media weirdness. I’m so there. And thanks to the way-with-it creator of Wishbone Zine for keeping me in the loop.

I think Kevin Fox makes a good point: Are you ready for a Sesame Street makeover? Yes, the program’s demographic is getting younger and times have changed but isn’t the idea that the show challenges kids, instead of strokes them?

However, I haven’t lost faith just yet. If anyone can reinvent themselves and stay true to their vision, it’s the folks at Children’s Television Workshop. When I saw the Sesame Street biography on A & E, it confirmed what I remembered asserting at age 4: This is the absolute best that television can be.

Make that one pen stroke.

An old joke: “How do you make God laugh?”
Answer: “Tell him your plans”

Oy, the change in the air. Not three days ago, I was driving home, in tears at how right life was, how beautiful the day was, in this the greatest city in world, and how happy I was to be alive, to be doing what I’m doing RIGHT NOW.

Saying that out out loud is like setting the eggtimer. In the last three days, I’ve found out my friend Dinah is moving to San Francisco (all right!), my friend Jay is moving away (which I knew), my friend Laura is leaving the neighborhood and heading to the East Bay and I’m about three pen strokes away from buying a house and moving, the biggest change one can make short of getting married, having a baby, or dying.

God is cracking up.

I don’t have it in me today, the energy to sit down and write. We’ve started a little virtual writing group over at the Central Booking forums and the goal is to write 30 minutes a day, no exceptions. Doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, poetry, letter to mama or complete gibberish (the area we’re visiting now). The idea is to instill in each of us a job-like discipline in writing, with hopes of shaking free from the self-criticism and doubt that often comes with it. If writing is an elementary to your day as brushing your teeth, how much can you really get worked up about it?

That’s the theory anyway. We’re on day 2 and everyone seems to be hanging with it just fine. I had a vague idea of how I wanted to spend my 30 minutes today (beginning an interview I did some time ago with Laura Fraser and just rescued from a corrupt hard drive, 2 or 3 essay ideas I’ve got knocking around) but that’s all going to have to wait. As my mom used to say I’m “too pooped to poop,” exhausted, whipped, flatter than newly-layed pavement. So I’m just going to blither blather here until my 30 minutes is up because it’s about all I can muster right now.

I spent the day participating in a city-wide scavanger hunt organized by some Standford folks my friend Amy knows. It goes something like this: You report to a designated point at noon, get an envelope of clues and try to figure out from them where to go next. At each stop, you have to cycle through all the information you’ve garnered thus far, figure out what it means and where it will send you next until, about 6 hours later, you come to the finish line. Its a treasure hunt for grownups.

Now I didn’t know any of these people and by nature, I’m not a competitive person, so I figured I’d be agreeable dead weight, follow everyone else’s lead and make occasional smart remarks. That plan lasted a few minutes. As soon as we hit our first clue, I was completely swept away, racking my brains, conferring with my teammates, desperately trying to outsmart the game masters. By clue #2, I was a raving lunatic, by the end, catatonic. Solving the puzzles is actually the least taxing thing you do during a hunt. The real shitkicker is the emotional roller coaster you’re on all day, feeling like a genius and a complete moron inside of a minute. Decipher a clue and you’re on top of the world. Get stuck and you’re fly on the dung heap of life. It’s brutal.

So I *yawn* stretch my aching muscles and contemplate bed at 9 pm as if I was a 5th grader. I’m beat but I had a great time. And am already scheming about how to do it again.

I’m dipping my feet in the volatile waters of property ownership in San Francisco so I was very interested when I saw a link to a story about Microflats on Caterina.net. Apparently, a London architecture firm has borrowed a page from house boat design and packed an entire apartment into 350 square feet. The design is being harolded as an affordable quality housing solution in urban centers, a puzzle only slightly less complicated than the Riddle of the Sphinx.

Cramming a lot in a small space is a lesson I should heed immediately. But affordable? Surely you jest. I’ve only been looking for a little while but I’ve had to quickly acknowledge that I will be morgaging the next several generations of my decendants so that I may have my couch in a different room from the refrigerator. What I would pay for a 2 bedroom condo right here would buy me an airport and a fleet of helicopters in my hometown. San Francisco is 7 miles by 7 miles. For 750,000 people. That’s it. That means that what space there is is all tall, thin, rectangular and locked behind a door. Small wonder the Victorian house caught on so quickly here. And yes, I know, you visited San Francisco once and thought they were sooooo beautiful. I did too until I considered buying a floor in one.

Victorians are layed out like this: One long hallway with rooms branching off it, like a railroad car. It made perfect sense 150 years ago when it was considered very impolite to come into the parlor wearing your dressing gown and wives worked hard to keep their husbands out of chambers with a “feminizing” influence. Each room’s activities were seperate, locked away from one another. Open space meant too much mixing of sin and virtue.

Call me a heretic but I’m into open. I find it inviting, homey even, when I can see a friend reading in the living room from the kitchen, or the toaster toasting while sitting on the corner of my bed. Open design to me say this is a space to be lived in, not to put forth the proper image to the neighbors.

And yes, there are more open floor plans in San Francisco. The dot-com boom created a whole rash of snazzo condo building with big windows, high ceilings and other such extravagence. But for pete’s sakes, you can get a Kohler sink fixture and granite countertop anywhere these days. If I want a home that looks like it was built five minutes ago in a suburban housing development, why don’t I get one in suburban housing development at half the price?

Because I want to live here, that’s why. I didn’t haul myself half way across the country to the greatest city in the world, to wave at it from 15 miles down the freeway. I want to live IN IT. And I’m just now realizing what sort of sacrifics that will entail.

I’m dipping my feet in the volatile waters of property ownership in San Francisco so I was very interested when I saw a link to Microflats on Caterina.net. Apparently, a London architecture firm has borrowed a page from house boat design and packed an entire apartment into 350 square feet.